I think that your Watchdog article about the new downtown library really missed the mark. The thrust of your piece seemed to be that books are not worth the time and effort spent to move and keep them, because not that many people read them anymore. You offer as proof irrelevant statistics, and the opinion of an 80 year old crackpot named Allen Hemphill, whose only listed qualification is that he resides in Hidden Meadows.

Mr. Hemphill, whomever he may be, is a veritable font of subjective misinformation whose quotes lent neither credibility nor plausibility to your article or the ideas that you advanced within it. I felt it was pretentious of you to present Hemphill as someone whose opinion carries more weight than that of any other bystander.

You clearly don't get it. A library exists to house knowledge and works of literature. They are a repository of records and need to be as complete as possible. Lending books is something a library does, but hardly its primary function. To judge the viability of a library based on the ancillary function of lending books shows a tremendous ignorance of your subject matter.

Batteries go dead. Pixels on a screen only exist when the machine is working, and can be erased in an instant. Books endure. Books are the hard copy of human history, culture, art and achievement, priceless and vital to our identity. If you need to find a newspaper article from 1941, you go to the library. To trivialize libraries as nothing more than book lenders is pretty dismal. The library at Alexandria was the center of research and knowledge in the ancient world, and whether or not it lent books is irrelevant, isn't it?

You imply that the new library is deficient or inefficient or somehow incompetent because they are handling so many books that never get borrowed. Libraries collect and preserve books as part of their primary function. Your idea that the value of a book depreciates if it is not borrowed is plain silly, but you must have considered it a given, judged by your feeble attempt at making a supporting case.

Ron Amick

Poway

Mean and vicious

Your vicious/mean spirited article seems to be lamenting the fact that the library has moved to a new and larger facility. This article should have been printed ten years ago, when the debate was still on about building a new library.

Your ‘selective’ use of statistics neglected to name all the thousands of ‘old’ books that have been checked out.

I am a young 75 and read over 80 books each and every year; my wife reads over 60. How many do you read?

Libraries are a vital and used part of every community, even downtown. In the past year, the one and only library in Encinitas had over 450,000 users.

Steve Moseley

Solana Beach

Off to the local library and then down to the Del Mar library

Big city abuses

So glad the UT watchdog is on the prowl for big city abuses--library books that no one has read in the last 12 months! I suppose we need to throw them out, just as we are advised to do with garments that have hung unworn in our closets for the last year. Since San Diego was only anointed "America's Finest City" because Mayor Pete Wilson was annoyed that the Republican convention didn't come here during Nixon's administration, our fine new library will bring this exalted designation closer to reality.